1970 · Haitianyear only

Two thirds of the doctors Haiti trained are working elsewhere

Of 761 physicians the capital produced over twenty-three years, 242 were still in the country.

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1970s to 1990s · Africanspan

Africa's export economies break when commodity prices fall

Copper collapses, oil quadruples, and governments that had bet on factories cannot feed their people.

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1970s to 1990s · Africanspan

Drought, debt and the lenders who rewrote African budgets

The Sahel dries, the cities swell, and by the early 1990s the IMF is setting the terms of the state.

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1970s to 2000s · Africanspan

The AK-47 ends the African state's monopoly on force

Guerrilla armies that beat regular forces in Eritrea, Uganda and Rwanda then had to decide what to become.

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1970s to 2010s · Africanspan

Famine is usually a decision about who eats

Zimbabwe sold its grain reserve for hard currency, then had nothing to release when the rain failed.

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1970 · Diasporayear only

The first Haitian runs for office in New York

Louis Brun stood, lost, went home to Haiti, and began a pattern that outlasted him.

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the 1970s to 2009 · Haitianspan

A hundred garment factories fall to twenty three in thirty years

The baseballs stop in 1987 and the embargo years take most of the rest.

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the 1970s · Diasporadecade

A man facing deportation to Haiti hangs himself in an American cell

Turenne Deville learned the immigration service was returning him and did not wait.

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1970 · Haitianyear only

Seven in ten Protestant missions in Haiti were under twenty years old

A fifth of the country counted as Protestant by 1970, most of that arriving recently.

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January 1970 · Haitianmonth known

A historian gives Vodou a scholarly footing in a learned journal

The Revue de la Societe Haitienne d'Histoire carries an introduction to the religion's own past.

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22 March 1970 · Haitian

A Paris court finds for Duvalier and awards him one franc

He had asked ten million francs for injury to his standing as doctor, ethnologist and statesman.

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24 April 1970 · Haitian

Five ships shell the National Palace and hit nothing

Colonel Octave Cayard turns the whole coast guard against Duvalier and waits for an army that stays home.

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24 to 26 April 1970 · Haitianspan

Duvalier's own precautions leave him nothing to answer the ships with

The single flyable fighter had been stripped of its guns, so land and sea shot at each other for two days.

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18 November to December 1970 · Haitianspan

A stroke on Armed Forces Day starts the succession moving

Duvalier reviews the troops on the Vertieres anniversary, collapses the next day, and begins arranging an heir.

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1971 · Haitianyear only

The state takes Saint-Martial and the Holy Ghost Fathers go

A century-old secondary school passes to the government and its French congregation is put out.

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1971 · Diasporayear only

Haitian exiles in New York build a theatre against the dictatorship

Tanbou Libete used Kreyol songs and plays to organise a community the regime could not reach.

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1971 to 1975 · Haitianspan

Duvalierism settles into middle age with four hundred prisoners

The torture moved to a downtown police station called the Cafeteria and the killing went on more quietly.

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1971 to 1978 · Diasporaspan

A New York Haitian weekly carries seven classified ads in its first year

Seven years later the same paper averaged more than fifty, and the exiles had become a market.

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1971 · Haitianyear only

Port-au-Prince passes half a million people

A capital of 175,000 in 1956 counted close to 500,000 fifteen years later.

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1971 to 1972 · Haitianspan

A Port-au-Prince schoolteacher earns forty dollars a month

A doctor in private practice took fifteen times what a primary teacher took.

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1971 to 1974 · Haitianspan

Haiti becomes the world's largest producer of baseballs

Forty three assembly plants in 1971 and two hundred in 1974, at a dollar sixty a day.

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1971 · Haitianyear only

A nineteen year old inherits Haiti and the capital starts building

Construction grew 12 percent, then 21 percent, then 25 percent.

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1971 · Haitianyear only

Nine farms in ten are under three hectares and carry most of the country

A day of labour cost one dollar sixty.

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January to February 1971 · Haitianspan

A council of five is named to run the country for the heir

Cambronne heads the regency; the president's wife and daughter supervise it without needing a title.

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22 January 1971 · Haitian

A ratification vote returns 2,391,916 yes and not one no

The assembly lowered the presidential age to eighteen, then asked the country to approve the boy.

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April 1971 · Haitianmonth known

Haiti becomes a republic where the presidency is inherited

Power passed from father to son with the army and Washington behind it, and nothing broke.

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April 1971 · Haitianmonth known

The palace spokesman insists there is no story

Duvalier missed his own sixty-fourth birthday celebration while de Catalogne told reporters he was resting.

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21 April 1971 · Haitian

Papa Doc buys six months, installs his son and dies in bed

After a heart attack in November 1970 he lived just long enough to secure the succession.

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21 April 1971 · Haitian

A oungan performs the desounen over a president for life

The rite that separates a person from the lwa in the head was carried out on the corpse by candlelight.

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21 April 1971 · Haitian

Everyone agrees the boy will fall and nobody can arrange it

The elite reckoned in weeks; the last Haitian ruler to name an heir had seen him bayoneted in a day.

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21 April 1971 · Haitian

The only Haitian succession by blood that ever held

Dessalines and Christophe both tried to found a line; only Papa Doc handed the state to a son.

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21 April 1971 · Haitian

Washington approves the son twenty days after the father dies

Clinton Knox called it a new Duvalierism worth every form of official encouragement.

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22 to 24 April 1971 · Haitianspan

Papa Doc is buried on Bawon Samdi's day and the wind comes up

A refrigerated glass case, a 101-gun salute, and a dust column at the cemetery gate that emptied the street.

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22 April 1971 · Haitian

The nineteen-year-old is sworn in and promises no pardons

Simone Duvalier ran the ceremony with the cabinet list in her hand; her son was heavily sedated.

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22 to 24 April 1971 · Haitianspan

Papa Doc is buried on Bawon Samdi's day, and the wind comes up

A refrigerated glass box, twenty-two soldiers, twenty-two miliciens, and a 101-gun salute.

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shortly after 1971 · Haitianapproximate

Two foreign companies get the right to look for Haitian copper

The new government opens the subsoil to outside prospectors as a signal that Haiti is open for business.

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after 1971 · Haitianapproximate

Assembly plants arrive to use the cheapest labour in the hemisphere

North American manufacturers move piecework to Port-au-Prince as the political weather softens.

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July 1971 to March 1972 · Haitianspan

The first palace fight sends the president's sister to Paris

Cambronne arrested a relative of Max Dominique and Simone Duvalier decided which child left the country.

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the early 1970s · Haitiandecade

Young writers answer the French embassy on what Kreyol can do

Dieudonne Fardin, Franck Etienne and others argue that the language everyone speaks is fit for modern life.

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the early 1970s · Haitiandecade

Spiralisme gives Haitian writers a form built at home

A literary movement reworks national tradition and slips judgments of the regime past the censors.

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1972 to 1980 · Diasporaspan

Fifty thousand ask the United States for asylum and twenty five get it

A senator described the rule in one sentence at a congressional hearing in 1980.

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the early 1970s · Diasporadecade

Exiles in three cities put new words to ritual songs

New York, Boston and Montreal, and cassettes smuggled back into Duvalier's Haiti.

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1972 · Haitianyear only

A Port-au-Prince firm ships Haitian blood plasma north by the gallon

Donors were paid three dollars a litre and the company resold at four to five.

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1972 · Haitianyear only

Farming gets 9.7 percent of the budget and policing gets thirty

Three million Haitians lived from the sector receiving under a tenth.

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April to July 1972 · Haitianspan

Foreign aid arrives and passes through one man's hands

Port-au-Prince starts calling Cambronne the Premier, an office the constitution does not contain.

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1972 · Haitianyear only

Two school systems, two ministries, and one language nobody speaks

One teacher for thirty two pupils in town, one for sixty eight in the hills.

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July to December 1972 · Haitianspan

Cambronne is cut out in a week and flies to Bogota

Roger Lafontant worked on the president while his mother was in Miami, and the blood business closed.

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1973 to 1974 · Haitianspan

Two hundred thousand tourists and a resort behind broken glass

Habitation Leclerc charged a Haitian year's income for one night and stood inside one of the worst slums.

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1973 to 1982 · Diasporaspan

A man towed in by a shrimp boat is later turned back at sea

Nelson Thomas reached Florida in 1973, went home for his mother, and was stopped on the water in 1982.

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1973 · Caribbeanyear only

CARICOM launches and governments take priority over peoples

Best asks whether the arrangement gave state relations precedence over popular ones.

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1973 · Haitianyear only

Roger Gaillard calls the building boom an implosion of the capital

People were building frantically, no matter where and no matter how.

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February to December 1973 · Haitianspan

An ambassador is kidnapped and the palace arsenal catches fire

Gunmen traded Knox for twelve prisoners, and a July blaze in the ammunition store shook the capital.

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1973 · Haitianyear only

A newspaper offers cheap blocks as the answer to Haiti's housing shortage

Children and old people sieving soil into a hand cranked press.

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July 1973 · Haitianmonth known

Bernard Dorin proposes Creole as an easy passage to French

Ninety five percent of Haitians spoke only the language being made a ramp.

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1974 · Haitianyear only

Honorat indicts seventeen years of Duvalierism from inside Haiti

Enquete sur le developpement argues that a Haitian church hierarchy changed nothing in the countryside.

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1974 · Haitianyear only

Haiti reaches the World Cup and Sanon beats Dino Zoff

The only Haitian goal of the tournament ended the longest shutout run in international football.

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May 1974 · Caribbeanmonth known

Haiti applies to CARICOM and gets a special relationship instead

Duvalier's commerce minister lobbied four capitals; the Secretariat balked for its own reasons.

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16 June 1974 · Haitian

The guerrilla leader behind Philipot dies in Fort Dimanche

Papa Doc had decided in 1970 that the Baptiste brothers would rot; both did, of tuberculosis.

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1975 to 1976 · Indigenousspan

Caribbean stone tool sites give up tools but not dates

Gus Pantel found blades growing larger with depth and no dependable way to say how old any of it was.

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1975 · Haitianyear only

A show trial over stamps while the crops fail

Drought, blackouts, and an empty tomb that cost several million dollars a block from the palace.

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1975 to 1976 · Haitianspan

A journalist disappears and the amnesty is timed to an American election

Gasner Raymond vanished in July 1976; 261 prisoners were released days after the vote in November.

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1975 · Haitianyear only

The first full length novel in Haitian Creole is published

Dezafi sold heavily in a country where almost every book had been printed in French.

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1975 · Africanyear only

Botswana takes seventy per cent of its diamonds without nationalising

Four years of bargaining with De Beers in place of a seizure decree.

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1975 · Haitianyear only

Trouillot asks in Kreyol who killed the emperor

Two years before his first book, the argument about language was already made.

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2 June 1975 · Haitian

Nine men die in one day inside Fort-Dimanche

Prisoners banged on the doors and passed the count from cell to cell.

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1976 to 2017 · Indigenousspan

Colonial map labels do not describe the islands people actually used

Windward and Leeward were administrative words applied to networks that took no notice of them.

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1976 to 1988 · Indigenousspan

A missionary doctor finds the site tied to Columbus's first voyage

William Hodges located En Bas Saline in northern Haiti and Kathleen Deagan mapped it with survey instruments.

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1976 · Diasporayear only

More Haitians live in New York than in Cap-Haitien

The second city of Haiti was already in another country by the middle of the 1970s.

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1976 · Haitianyear only

A survey finds the richest tenth of Port-au-Prince on 41 percent of its land

The poor majority, 65 percent of the people, lived on 29 percent of it.

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29 July 1976 · Haitian

Rosalie Bosquet takes the highest rank in the militia

The woman who ran Fort-Dimanche was promoted on the militia's own anniversary.

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November 1976 to early 1977 · Haitianspan

A letter to Jimmy Carter fills the jails of Port-au-Prince

Two Baptists exchange notes about torture and more than a hundred people in the capital are arrested.

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1977 · Haitianyear only

Trouillot writes a history of Haiti entirely in Kreyol

Ti dife boule sou istwa Ayiti put the masses at the centre and used the language they speak.

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1977 · Haitianyear only

Seventy five people in the Northwest die of hunger in two days

An exile newspaper carried the count, along with tuberculosis among students at Cap-Haitien.

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1977 · Haitianyear only

Three thousand Haitian women answer the first national survey

Before it, nobody could say with any confidence how many children Haitian women were having.

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1977 · Haitianyear only

One Haitian woman in four is using something to avoid a birth

Most of what they used was withdrawal, rhythm and abstinence.

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1977 · Haitianyear only

Five words for a Haitian union and one of them means married

Rinmin, fiyanse, viv avek, plase and marye, sorted by housing and by money.

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1977 · Haitianyear only

Haitian women enter a first union at eighteen or nineteen

Urban women began about a year earlier than women in the countryside.

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1977 · Haitianyear only

Three thousand people die of hunger in the Northwest

Of 245,000 people living in the region, 170,000 were counted as destitute.

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1977 · Haitianyear only

Famine kills three thousand people and the answer is a study

The report's stated purpose was to reorient Haitian agriculture.

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4 April 1977 · Diaspora

Two thousand march in Washington for a human rights policy on Haiti

The conservative wing of the exile community had found an American administration it could work with.

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22 April to 16 August 1977 · Haitianspan

Jean-Claudism is announced in the third year of the drought

A new ideology promises economic progress in a country that has begun importing sugar.

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1977 · Diasporayear only

Trouillot writes the first history of the revolution in Kreyol

Composed in New York under Duvalier, out of print for decades, untranslated until 2021.

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22 September to 18 October 1977 · Haitianspan

The state frees 104 prisoners and declares it holds no others

Relatives of the disappeared are invited to apply to the courts for a certificate of death.

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October to December 1977 · Haitianspan

Washington praises Haiti while freed men describe Fort Dimanche

An American delegate reports satisfaction with reforms as prisoners give the hours of the prison day.

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November 1977 to early 1978 · Haitianspan

A bull is sacrificed carrying Jimmy Carter's photograph

The press is shut, a pastor is beaten into a coma, and Simone Duvalier decides Gede has left.

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1978 to 1979 · Haitianspan

A bribery case in Los Angeles reopens the question of American aid

A convicted aide talks, and the man who could confirm him sails for Cuba in a boat he cannot handle.

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1978 to 1979 · Haitianspan

Baseballs are sewn in Port-au-Prince while the land gives out

Sixty thousand assembly jobs in the capital, and coffee exports at half the level of 1910.

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1978 to 1979 · Haitianspan

A president paid 24,000 dollars a year buys a million dollar yacht

Foreign officials begin admitting to each other that they do not know where the aid goes.

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1978 to 1979 · Haitianspan

The cordon fails and swine fever reaches the Artibonite

Twenty seven thousand pigs killed on the border, and the disease appears in the best farmland anyway.

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1978 · Haitianyear only

Kreyol gets a spelling and the majority gets a written language

Nine Haitians in ten spoke a language that until this year had no agreed way of being written.

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1978 · Diasporayear only

A play in Kreyol about two Haitians in a New York basement

Franketyen published it in 1978 and gave up writing in French the year after.

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late 1970s · Haitianapproximate

The export sector at its peak offers sixty thousand jobs

Hundreds of thousands of people had moved to the capital looking for work.

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1979 to 27 May 1980 · Haitianspan

Jean-Claude Duvalier marries a Bennett and the country asks why

A five million dollar wedding, watched in the slums on television sets the government provided.

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1979 · Haitianyear only

Haitian law treated a married woman as a minor until 1979

Land law kept doing the same work after the civil code stopped.

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1979 · Diasporayear only

Television journalists expelled from Haiti start broadcasting from New York

The men thrown out of Port-au-Prince studios built Haitian television in Brooklyn instead.

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1979 to 1981 · Diasporaspan

Seventy thousand Haitians reach Florida by boat in three years

Open fishing canoes crossed the Windward Passage until cutters were sent to stop them.

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1979 · Haitianyear only

A bag of cement costs a quarter of a monthly wage in Port-au-Prince

Fifteen percent of that price went straight to the state monopoly office.

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autumn 1979 · Diasporaseason

A Miami hospital loses a Haitian patient to an illness that has no name yet

Jean Baptiste had a proven diagnosis, the right drugs, and he kept getting worse.

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